What this paper is.
The Animal Attack Index is a single, continuously updated record of human–wildlife conflict: shark bites and bear maulings, elephant tramplings and snakebite deaths, the incidents that make headlines and the far larger number that never do.
Every dispatch on this page is pulled live from the wire and filed against a structured database of more than a million historical incidents.
How stories are filed.
Reports are collected continuously from The Guardian and Newsdata.io, scored for relevance, de-duplicated, and classified by species. Anything scoring below the threshold — a football result, a heart attack, a movie review — is rejected before it reaches this page.
Historical figures come from the Index database, browsable in full under .
Found an error?
The Index is compiled by one person and corrections are welcome. Records that are wrong, missing, or miscategorised can be reported and will be amended in the next edition.
| Species | Incidents | Fatalities | Lethality |
|---|
This paper has no owner,
no advertising, and no paywall.
The Animal Attack Index runs on a news wire, a map server and a million-row database. Those cost money every month. If the Index is useful to you, a small donation keeps it free and open for everyone else.